Dungeon Colony Rooms - Ownership

I've introduced some of the new room features in a previous blog post. Since then I've continued on rooms and built the logic to let minions take ownership of the room Lair type. All a minion needs to walk on a tile that is defined as the room type Lair and if that room is still vacant, the minion will automatically become owner of it. I will add a way to remove owners as well. Other room types, such the Pantry or Treasury do not need owners. They have different functions such as managing food and gold reserves for the entire Dungeon.

You can see in the following Gif animation some of the new features in action:

1. I'm first setting up two Lair rooms by selecting the lair room button on the right and then drawing the room in. (Lair rooms have the color blue)
2. Then I'm sending a minion in the left room; as soon as he enters the room tile, he becomes owner.
3. The other new feature is the room info. You can see that I de-selected the room tool button and the blue color showing the room area disappears. However, you can still see the room designation in a lighter blue when hovering the mouse over the room. After a few milliseconds, a popup also gives information about the room. In this case whether the room has an owner or not. 

What's not shown in the gif above is some additional info when hovering over a room. If the lair has an owner, the owner will be highlighted, so that you can find out quickly where the owner is.

... Next: I'll start building the logic that determines what a minion can do in a room. 

Dungeon Colony Rooms - A first look

Minions!

I've started designing Rooms for Dungeon Colony! This is where things get interesting. The main purpose of rooms is determined by their type. For now, I'm introducing and testing three room types: Lair, Pantry, and Treasury. These rooms all play a fundamental role in the up-coming economy update. The Lair will be the room that your creatures sleep in. Your minions can claim a room and become the owner of it. I'm planning to assign ownership by walking into a room. Currently, only the Lair can be owned by your creatures. The other rooms are common or belong to your Dungeon Master by default (the treasury of course).

As a minion takes ownership of a room, it becomes his hub for anything that he needs. That includes sleep, food, potions, weapons and gold of course. To store all of that, your minion will ask you for furniture... That part I am going to work on soon. Right now I'm finishing up the UX features. That is the way that you can create room of different room types. As well as how the UX responds to you when you try to place a room or remove a room again. For example, I've built in features that allows you to merge existing rooms of the same type, or splits rooms into two (or more), while reassigning ownership of any previous room owners. Anyway ... if that makes no sense, I think a small demo is nicer to show some of it in action:

Placing rooms is just like drawing in a paint program: You choose the room type, which will draw the color of the room to show you where the room dimensions are. If you turn the Room-Button off, the room colors will be hidden. For development purposes I show the room ID, so that I can merge or split rooms correctly (see red pantry room in demo). I will reveal more about rooms as features become available.

Game Editor Progress - Quest Manager

I began work on the Quest Manager not too long ago. This is going to be some beast. Not only does it require a flexible graph structure (see screenshot of sketch below), but it also must be easy to use and have many different options to create a wide variety of quests. To see the entire progress of the editor click here (updated regularly). Also visit DungeonColony.com/Download to try the free alpha.

I created a few new controls to make the Quest Manager more efficient, which are a Dropdown list and TextArea. This is definitively reinventing the wheel. But there's something about doing things from scratch. I like to think about it like LEGOs, when you have a set, you get excited about building something from scratch, it would be super lame if the set came pre-built. I think for many, more than half the fun is in building:

With those I started working on the new Quest Manager Frame:

This will allow the user to create a series of quests for the current map being built. The types are very flexible and over time I will add new types. For now I'll work with those monotone colors. Eventually I will improve the look.

Next I will work on the preview Screen. It just shows you how the quest will look before you create it. Additionally, there is also a Show Graph button. I am very excited to start working on that, since it will be a GUI representation of the Quest Graph. I have no idea how challenging this will be, but I can wait to find out.  It will have to be something that works kind of like this:

Also some doodles:

Game Editor Progress - Entity Editor and Settings

You can track the progress of the game editor right here. You can also download the free alpha here. And please, support Dungeon Colony by pre-purchasing the game and setting your own price. Every coin you contribute is reinvested into game development.

Thank you!

The game editor is coming along very well: I finished the level settings and have completed the basics for editing game entities. The following screenshot (click to enlarge) shows these two additions:

1. Entity Editor
On the left side is the new entity editor frame. This allows the user to select any entity on the map (creatures and objects) and edit their individual attributes. You can basically make a creature extremely strong and create a boss, for example. The attributes that can be edited depend on the entity type. And each available & editable property will be shown to the user when selected.

And a special feature allows the user to edit the attributes of entities that are shown in the toolbox instead of entities that are placed on the map. This allows you to preset attributes and then place a copy of the same object in bulk on the map. This should allow creating complex maps much faster.

2. Level Settings
On the right hand side of the screenshot is the new Level Settings frame view. This allows the user to select level settings such as enemy waves, air requirements, & dungeon entrance.

1. Enemy waves on/off: Allows the user to create a level that does/doesn't include enemy waves.
2. Creatures need air on/off: Removes the need for Air. That is useful when creating maps that don't have the outside world. 
3. Dungeon Entrance on/off: Doesn't require an entrance to the outside world. 

What's next:
Take a look at the current Todo-List to find out more. But at the time of this writing, I started on the Quest Manager. There is one already built into the game, and when you play the sandbox mode, quests are currently being displayed in the upper left corner. I will extend this existing Quest Manager to include a way for the user to create quests and assign them to a quest tree. The tree itself will not be a simple tree structure, but a directed acyclical graph with nodes that represent quests and edges that define quest relationships. This task is already quite big on paper; so I'm expecting this to take a few days of work to complete...

Here's a sketch of the quest tree manager:

Game Editor Progress

Here's a screenshot of the improved ToolBox I just finished. This shot shows some of the tiles that can be drawn onto the canvas


New improvements...

1. Allow moving the frame around making it easier to work with. 
2. Increase the height and add an additional row of content in the table.
3. Add the logic to the light switch button. That turns on/off the shadows so that working in a dark dungeon is easier. 

I updated the ToDoList to reflect those changes.

... on to the next item... 

Beginning of Dungeon Colony 0.1.9.x - Level Editor

Version 0.1.8.x is now officially finished. The significant improvement was reducing the size of tiles, allowing different sizes of object. This change added new dimensions for game play, strategy, and better dungeon design.


Now that this version is completed the question is, what's next?? There are still some important game elements missing (tba). However, the basics needed to create a full working game are now finished. Therefore, the next version (0.1.9.x) will bring a new engine element that allows content creation - a Game Editor. This will allow me to start building the main quest for the game. Players will have a choice to continue playing the sandbox mode or play the new quest mode.

I have started on the editor and, so far, I have a clear canvas to draw stuff on the map and I created a new content window that acts like a toolbox. In the window, you can select object which you can drag on to the map. The things you can select so far are tiles, objects and creatures. Objects can be rotated and removed; tiles, such as ground and wall tiles, can be drawn. And I added a lights on/off switch to show/hide shadows that are cast inside the dungeon.

Blank canvas to draw on + Toolbox with Objects and Tiles

Placement of objects and tiles, Rotation of objects and Light on/off switch

I am building the editor right into the game instead of making a separate tool. While it requires separation from the main game, including the editor into the engine should make level design more dynamic (i.e. cast shadows dynamically as you build a dungeon etc.)

Finally, due to instabilities from implementing the editor, this version won't be released until it is completed, but I will post progress regularly.